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I figured a team from the Bay Area was a must, but there are so many big cities there that I didn’t want to leave any out, and plus, I didn’t know where I was putting the team yet. When I looked into what I would name the team, though, it figured itself out for me. The team is the Sea Lions, based on the sea lions at San Francisco’s Pier 39. The species of sea lion that lives there is the California sea lion. Now the team is the California Sea Lions. Very Florida Panthers-y, but I like it.

As you may have figured out, I like to use city symbols to get color inspiration for my teams. I originally had the sea lions as a dark blue team, but when I looked at the seal of San Francisco (seal? sea lion? ok), I figured, “why not purple?” Having such a simple logo, I figured they could be a classic, two-color team, and I used cream because I could. Purple and cream is pretty unique; certainly today, and especially in this league, so why not? The sea lion has nine whiskers, one for each county in the Bay Area, and is always purple, because a cream sea lion just didn’t work. The secondary logo is designed to look like a sea lion as well as an S, and an L when flipped so I could use it in the wordmark (I almost made those purple-on-purple too but it seemed impractical). I decided to make California in a modern font to make this a concept that belongs in 2017, although it doesn’t make it on any of the team’s uniforms. Overall, this is probably my favorite look in the league so far.

The Sea Lions have fairly simple uniforms, because I wanted them to look classic and let the unique color scheme do the talking. Their primary uniform is pretty ordinary, the only notable feature being the nine stripes on the shorts, which references the nine whiskers, which references the nine counties. The secondary is simply a reversal of the primary. For the tertiary and quaternary, I wanted to do pinstripes, because pinstripes are cool, so one is cream with purple pinstripes and the other is purple with cream pinstripes. The Sea Lions are also the only team to have numbers on their shorts, which I figured seems like a quirky thing they would do.

Mostly purple on the court, although the stain is the same cream color, it’s just harder to tell. The tertiary logo and that square-looking font finally get some use outside the logo sheet, in the end zone and along the top, respectively. Also, they’ve colored in the space between the 3-point and 5-point lines purple, which looks like a C for California.

Let me know if any of this works or doesn’t work. Part of me kinda feels like I overdid the whole fauxback thing, but the other part of me likes it too much to do anything else.

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Love the name Sea Lions and the color scheme. You executed the simple look very well. I have some observations and questions (sorry if it's too lengthy):

1) Is every team going to have 4 jerseys? 4 was too many for Chicago (wasn't a fan of the BFBS uniform) and seems like an overkill for teams with simpler color palettes, especially since throwbacks aren't an option yet. This being said, I like the uniform set for Cali.

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1) Is every team going to have 4 jerseys? 4 was too many for Chicago (wasn't a fan of the BFBS uniform) and seems like an overkill for teams with simpler color palettes, especially since throwbacks aren't an option yet. This being said, I like the uniform set for Cali.

Four is the maximum number of uniforms for each team, at least for now. That said, most teams will have four uniforms this season, though some will only have three. Hopefully, the remaining teams will be interesting enough to justify four uniform sets.

Honestly, I'm not sure how I missed that, given that I've been following the AFA for over a year now. If you or @Veras would like me to change it or remove it, I will. As for the wordmark, that's definitely one of my favorite things I've done, so I'm glad you like it!

12 hours ago, ~Bear said:

3) I like the idea of you reaching out to predict uniform trends. This will make this more unpredictable than most series.

Thanks! I haven't gone into too much detail, but I can say there will be some interesting things in store for the future.

12 hours ago, ~Bear said:

4) Since you plan to predict uniform trends, does this mean you will (somewhat) predict growing markets for team placement (i.e. more Southeast teams, less Rust Belt teams).

I can't say I'll be predicting where teams are located, as that will be largely determined by expansion counsels, but my preparation for expansion counsels will likely involve a fair amount of prediction/extrapolation.

2 hours ago, nick_crenshaw82 said:

Because it is presumably a young sport it will have its teams all over the country.

P.S. I can't wait for the Denver/Colorado team.

Like I mentioned earlier, I tried to spread the teams out geographically as much as possible. I know not everyone will like where the teams ended up, but that's why we have expansion.

Honestly, I'm not sure how I missed that, given that I've been following the AFA for over a year now. If you or @Veras would like me to change it or remove it, I will. As for the wordmark, that's definitely one of my favorite things I've done, so I'm glad you like it!

I don't mind the similarity between the Whales primary and the Seals tertiary at all. I definitely noticed the similarity, but California's shape just lends itself very well to a look like that. I never thought that you ripped it off or anything like that. The same thing has happened to me more than once. The first Ghosts logo I made was almost identical to the John Cena chain gang logo (which I had never seen before), and the most recent Victory Bowl logo bears a strong resemblance to the NFL's 75th anniversary logo (which I had seen and forgotten about). For that matter, @hawkfan89 just wrote a really interesting thing in the PHL thread about a similar experience.

The only two critiques that I would have for this are 1) I agree with @~Bear about the fourth jersey being unnecessary. I like the cream with purple pinstripes, but I'm not a fan of the purple with cream stripes; and 2) I would suggest making the purple slightly lighter. I love the dark purple/cream combo, but I think you went a little too dark. When I first read you describe it as purple, I thought it was a typo. I had to turn the brightness on my monitor all the way up to see it as anything other than black, and even then, I probably would have thought it was blue if I didn't already know otherwise.

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I don't mind the similarity between the Whales primary and the Seals tertiary at all. I definitely noticed the similarity, but California's shape just lends itself very well to a look like that. I never thought that you ripped it off or anything like that. The same thing has happened to me more than once. The first Ghosts logo I made was almost identical to the John Cena chain gang logo (which I had never seen before), and the most recent Victory Bowl logo bears a strong resemblance to the NFL's 75th anniversary logo (which I had seen and forgotten about). For that matter, @hawkfan89 just wrote a really interesting thing in the PHL thread about a similar experience.

The only two critiques that I would have for this are 1) I agree with @~Bear about the fourth jersey being unnecessary. I like the cream with purple pinstripes, but I'm not a fan of the purple with cream stripes; and 2) I would suggest making the purple slightly lighter. I love the dark purple/cream combo, but I think you went a little too dark. When I first read you describe it as purple, I thought it was a typo. I had to turn the brightness on my monitor all the way up to see it as anything other than black, and even then, I probably would have thought it was blue if I didn't already know otherwise.

The reverse pinstripes jersey was another I didn't see the team using much, but I did want to make some "bad" decisions. Hopefully, that'll be the end of those . As for the purple, I totally agree; now that I took a closer look at it, it was way too dark. I lightened it up a shade and I think it helps a lot. I also updated Chicago across the board with thicker strokes.

Unfortunately, I can't do that because spoilers, but I'm glad you're that excited for the rest of the series. I'll have the next team up tomorrow, so you can look forward to that for now.

2 hours ago, mnfarmkids said:

Saw this, loved it. Saw Chicago, got hyped. Saw the Sea Lions, wondered how I could get involved. Love this concept and what you're doing with it.

1 hour ago, nick_crenshaw82 said:

Can we create the owners/players for the teams or have you already created those.

I do have owners and players for all the teams lined up already, but if you want to get involved, I will be running expansion counsels similar to the AFA and PHL (links will take you to the most recent EC from each), so you can create characters for those. Thanks everyone for the support so far.

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I’m a bit of a history nerd, so when I’m trying to find a name for a team, I like to start with the history of the city or the region. When I came to Dallas, a lot of what I found was cowboys, guns, and oil, all of which have probably been overdone. However, in case you haven’t heard, Texas used to be its own country (and if you haven’t heard that, you’ve never been to Texas). The currency of the Republic of Texas was the Texas dollar (no clue how they came up with that one), and due to the color of the ink on the back, the bills quickly became known as “redbacks.” I figured if the Ottawa CFL team can be called the RedBlacks, I can name a team the Redbacks (there are also a few teams around Australia called the Redbacks named after the spider native to the continent). With that in mind, here are the Texas Redbacks:

This is apparently what the back of the bills looked like. There was no way I was trying to make sense of that pattern on the inside of the star, so I opted for a similarly Texan star with an R inside. For the secondary, I made one in the shape of Texas with the same pattern (I tried centering it around Dallas, but it didn’t work, so I centered it around Brady, Texas, which has absolutely no significance, except that the city is in the geographical center of the state). I also made a cool little TR logo. The colors are taken from the Texan flag, which takes its colors from the American flag.

No, I didn’t make a mistake. Yes, that is actually what that uniform is supposed to look like. No, you’re not seeing things. Let me explain:

I figured with a name like Redbacks, I had to try a uniform with a red back. I mean, come on. But then I thought, if the back is red and the front is white, which it should be to make focus on the red part, what if I made a blue yoke-like-thing and put a star on the shoulders and made it look like the Texas flag? Of course, I had to do it now. Both stars are facing the front because otherwise, it would be backwards on one side (technically, only the left sleeve shows proper vertical display of the flag, but I can’t fix that). No words on the front because, let’s face it, if you can’t figure out what team this is by looking at this uniform, then one of us has done something wrong. As cool as the primary uniform is, I figured a team with red in its name should have uniforms that were actually red, not just partly red. It’s based on this flag, supposedly the first Texas lone star flag. I put Texas on the front because it’s based on a flag, so I figured I should put the location on there. Also, for the logo on the shorts, I didn’t think the blue belonged, so the R is red. The tertiary originally didn’t exist, but when I was making what was the tertiary and was now the quaternary, I noticed it looked really good in blue and white, so it stayed like that. It is also inspired by a coupledifferentflags. The quaternary is, surprise, based off another flag. Once I found this flag, I was like hey, this would be cool to make a jersey out of, so I did, but I made yellow the primary color because they already have a blue uniform and plus the yellow looks cooler. Again, the shorts logo has been recolored to yellow and blue because consistency.

Lotta red here, as to be expected. I put the Texas logo at midcourt because I liked how it looked and I thought that was what a team from Texas would do, especially this one. The apron reads “Come and Take It,” a popular slogan from the Texan Revolution at the Battle of Gonzales (and yes, there’s a flag to go with it).

This is by far my favorite set out of the three you have released and I feel like this will remain my favorite set. All four jerseys look amazing. Simplistic, but amazing. The White/Red jersey gives them their own unique look and the Yellow jersey gives them the unexpected twist that people might not have seen coming. Keep up the amazing work.

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The uniforms are pretty simple, but they work with the brand. I love the "redback" uniform. For this set, I like all 4 uniforms. The bright yellow doesn't exactly fit the color scheme, but it reminds me of Tottenham third kit from a few years ago.

Overall, good job. Love the unique name and historical significance. Its the thinking outside the box that makes this brand unique. Can't wait for #4.

Texas looks great. Is there typically a clash between shirt and shorts- that seems to be generally the case with California and Texas- or does it vary by team? Also, I feel this league should have at least one location name that isn't city or state based such as "Golden State" or "Capital". Anything like that planned? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

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Texas looks great. Is there typically a clash between shirt and shorts- that seems to be generally the case with California and Texas- or does it vary by team? Also, I feel this league should have at least one location name that isn't city or state based such as "Golden State" or "Capital". Anything like that planned? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

It depends on the team, the colors, and the design. Some teams will even do both (California has two uniforms where the shorts and shirt clash and two that don't). As for location identifiers, I don't have any like that planned, but I can't rule it out.

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It depends on the team, the colors, and the design. Some teams will even do both (California has two uniforms where the shorts and shirt clash and two that don't). As for location identifiers, I don't have any like that planned, but I can't rule it out.

You could call the Denver team the Mile High (insert team name).

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Antonio Vega, 36 tech entrepreneur, founder of FaceSpace, heir apparent of Vega Tech Inc. Tony is keeping a close eye on this new sport that if proven successful he hope to have the sole rights to all video game licences.

Antonio Vega, 36 tech entrepreneur, founder of FaceSpace, heir apparent of Vega Tech Inc. Tony is keeping a close eye on this new sport that if proven successful he hope to have the sole rights to all video game licences. He is also strongly campaigning to get a team in his home town of Denver, even promising to build a stadium.

I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're jumping the gun quite a bit. Feel free to keep that bio on the back burner, but please wait until I actually open an expansion counsel to submit it. Also, I will be picking the candidate cities, and I would ask that your bio not show bias towards one of those cities (even if you will be biased in your voting).

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I appreciate your enthusiasm, but you're jumping the gun quite a bit. Feel free to keep that bio on the back burner, but please wait until I actually open an expansion counsel to submit it. Also, I will be picking the candidate cities, and I would ask that your bio not show bias towards one of those cities (even if you will be biased in your voting).

I altered the post but I would like to keep the post up, it's helping me to get closer to a 100 posts so that I can get more access to this forum.